Wealth & Money Quote by William Greider

Greider’s move here is to treat “we can’t afford it” as a rhetorical prop, not an economic fact. By picking a modest, almost boring growth rate - 1.5 percent per capita - he refuses the fantasy that prosperity requires a tech-boom miracle. The number is the point: if even mediocre growth yields “plenty of money,” then the real scarcity is political will, not national income.

The subtext is an indictment of how America narrates its own limits. “Comfortable retirements” and “high-quality healthcare” are framed as baseline dignities, not boutique benefits, and the phrase “including those at the bottom of the wage ladder” deliberately forces the reader to confront distribution. Greider isn’t simply promising abundance; he’s implying that current outcomes are choices made inside an economy that already produces enough. The quiet accusation: we’ve built institutions that funnel gains upward, then call the resulting insecurity inevitable.

Context matters because this argument sits in the long fight over entitlement politics and austerity - the recurring attempt to recast Social Security, Medicare, and universal coverage as math problems rather than value decisions. Greider’s emphasis on per capita income also sidesteps population-growth panic and keeps the focus on living standards. It’s a deliberately sober provocation: if the country is rich enough on paper, what exactly are we protecting when we say we can’t protect people?